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June 5, 2010 :: elegy in essay form I found out this morning via Jim Behrle's facebook and then his twitter that David Markson has passed away. "David Markson has died." Behrle doesn't blither. Quick search on the web, and I've got nothing, but this makes sense to me. Markson, a giant of postmodernism-- if you're true to the word-- maintained closer friendships than he courted publicity. His life and work are intertwined, and his memory will live on in those he touched as well as in his works of art. Perhaps I find my method of discovery at his passing ironic considering Markson himself would have never found out about anything the way I did. He would tell me, visiting the poetry and literary non-fiction stacks of Strand Bookstore, how he still used a typewriter to write, wrote things down on notecards when planning his novels, only took calls on his landline and didn't feel he had any need for a cell phone or computer. It wasn't that he was against tec…

I've been on a mission to watch as many movies that came out in 2017 as possible, and I decided earlier to create a series of blog posts within which I review two that I've seen. So far I have seen 7, so there will be some catching up. I'll be rating them using my own made up system of pluses, minuses, & other marks of punctuation, including but not limited to exclamation points, parentheses, exponents, & more.

LADY BIRD (contains spoilers)
There is little to dislike about this coming-of-age film set in the early 2000s in California. Lady Bird is well-written, well-acted, and features extremely sympathetic and at times relatable (esp. if you grew up during the birth of the internet and came of age during the heydays of AIM) characters, Lady Bird/Christine herself and her friend Julia being the two I rooted for the most. Lady Bird, however, despite her self-inflicted oddness and ownership of it at the Catholic High School she seemingly happily attends, does have som…

I made the mistake this semester of taking three classes and auditing one. Even though I didn't have to do the coursework for the one I audited, just the reading/participation, it was still too much. I didn't have time to do things that I normally like to do, that are important to me--let alone things that I do generally because I do them. Such as.... writing about the books I read.

HERE are all the books I read from February-April during this semester, excluding re-reads, with brief snippets of thoughts after them...

FEBRUARYCaligula by Albert CamusThe Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
For my drama class, we read these two plays the same week. I preferred the Dürrenmatt because the characters were more interesting to me, particularly Claire, the cruel/eccentric/wealthy woman who returns to her hometown for revenge. Caligula was interesting to me in terms of it as an existential retelling of an old story, but the characters blended more easily.